Labour MP warns against SNP's insistence separation only way to get rid of
Tory government, while First Minister enters new legal advice row

On first hearing, Jim Murphy’s words on television on Sunday that Conservative policies are “poison” for Scotland and that he won’t share a platform with Tories will jar with many Unionists.

Personally, I find the partisan antagonism from both Labour and Conservatives towards each other more than a bit pathetic and as this column has noted before now, there are too many from either camp fighting the 2015 general election, instead of concentrating on what’s happening this year.

But if you cared to listen to the rest of what the former Scottish Secretary and now shadow international development secretary had to say on the BBC’s Sunday Politics you might find it hard to disagree with his common-sense approach to the coming referendum on breaking up Britain.

Mr Murphy makes no bones about his anti-Tory credentials but insists that this year’s campaign on independence is not about getting rid of the Conservative-led Coalition. He describes as “ludicrous and desperate” the SNP’s insistence that only by voting “yes” can the electorate make sure they won’t get another Tory government.

The referendum in September is not, he says, a protest vote about Tories and he ridiculed the idea put forward by the Nats that the answer to getting rid of them was to change your passport or set up a Scottish Army, as would happen with independence. Much more importantly, however, he said what needs to be repeated again and again — especially to the “ultras” in both Tory and Labour camps — which is that the vote of Sept 18 is much more important than a general election.

“Governments come and go, independence is forever,” he said.

Meanwhile, was I the only one who imagined that Alex Salmond had all his fingers crossed when he was challenged about the latest attack on his supposed keynote policies?

A group of senior academics has claimed that the Nats’ plan to continue to charge English, Welsh and Northern Irish students for university education in Scotland after independence would probably be counter to European law.

At present, students from the rest of the UK have to pay tuition fees but those from other parts of the EU must be treated the same as Scottish students and receive free education.

However, the SNP have said they would continue to charge the former even if Scotland became independent – and came up with some far-fetched excuses for so doing, when the real reason is that it would cost them between £150 million and £200 million to exempt them from the fees. Such a sum would be an enormous drain on Scotland’s university funding. In one of his wilder flights of hyperbole, Mr Salmond has decreed that the “rocks would melt with the sun” before he’d charge Scots, and therefore EU students, for university tuition fees. But he wants to keep charging the Brits after independence, a pledge that a group called Academics Together said would “run into significant problems with European law”.

They called on Mr Salmond to publish his own legal advice on the issue, something the First Minister refused to do but said that what he was proposing on tuition fees had been contained in his recent White Paper, all of whose proposals had legal clearance.

Alex Salmond and legal advice on controversial policy issues … haven’t we been here before? And didn’t Wee Eck come a cropper then, too? Elsewhere, we had the hilarious situation where the Scottish Government, which is run by the SNP and administered by a wholly compliant civil service, produced a report that declared solemnly that a policy, dreamed up by the SNP, on

childcare and getting more women into the workplace was, well, pretty wonderful.

Its opening reads: “A new economic analysis from the Scottish Government shows improving access to affordable early learning and childcare has the potential to substantially boost the labour market in Scotland by reducing a key barrier to participation faced by some parents with young children.”

So there we have it: the SNP thinks the SNP is fantastic.

You really couldn’t make it up. Banana republics have nothing on this place.